GoKawiilIn the original 1881 version, the book ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree.
Carlo Collodi serialised the story in Il Giornale per i bambini, the first Italian children's magazine, beginning on July 7, 1881. The first installment was titled Storia di un burattino — Story of a Puppet. Eight episodes later, over four months, the Fox and the Cat lured Pinocchio into a forest at night, robbed him, and strung him from the branch of la Quercia grande, the Great Oak: gli legarono le mani dietro le spalle, e passatogli un nodo scorsoio intorno alla gola, lo attaccarono penzoloni al ramo di una quercia. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave one great convulsion, and stayed there as if frozen stiff. Fine.
Collodi was done. He had collected his fee. Italian children wrote in begging him to continue. He resumed reluctantly five months later, on February 16, 1882, with the title changed from Storia di un burattino to Le avventure di Pinocchio and a Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair, lying in a window of a forest cottage — appearing in chapter sixteen to revive him.
The next twenty-one chapters are not gentler.
The cricket, killed
A talking cricket appears in chapter four to lecture Pinocchio about respecting his father. Pinocchio picks up a hammer from the workbench and hurls it. The cricket rimase lì stecchito e appiccicato alla parete — stuck flat to the wall, dead. He returns later as a ghost, but Collodi narrates the death with the deadpan tone of a police report.
The feet, burned off
In chapter seven, exhausted and freezing, Pinocchio falls asleep with his wooden feet propped on a brazier. He wakes up with no feet. Geppetto carves him a new pair the following morning. There is no moral framing of the loss; it is treated as an inconvenience.
The fairy, originally a corpse
When she first appears in chapter fifteen she is con i capelli turchini, e il viso bianco come un'immagine di cera, gli occhi chiusi e le mani incrociate sul petto — turquoise hair, a face white as a wax effigy, eyes closed, hands crossed on the chest. She tells the panicking Pinocchio she is dead and the bier is being prepared. Only in later installments does she become a living girl, then a fairy, then something approaching a mother.
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